Denis Johnson’s award-winning novella Train Dreams —the source material of a new Netflix movie that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year—was first published in the Paris Review in 2002, then made available as a book in 2011. You can read it in 70 to 90 minutes, but somehow that brief spell of time feels almost endless. Before you know it, you’re lost in the woods, much like Robert Grainier, the 20 th -century man Johnson makes his subject.

Grainier, an orphan sent to Idaho by train at the age of 6 or 7 with a destination pinned to his coat, is an ordinary person—a laborer who makes a living building railroads, joining seasonal logging crews, and, as an older man, hauling freight with a wagon. “He’d had one lover—his wife, Gladys—owned one acre of property, two hor

See Full Page